Gerard Byrne
23 March – 4 May 2007

Gerard Byrne’s art practice utilizes video and photography to question the ways
in which images are constructed, transmitted and mediated. His work examines
the modes and conventions of image-making and analyzes the mechanics of
representation itself. Influenced by literature and theatre, Gerard Byrne’s work
consistently references a range of sources, from popular magazines of the recent
past to iconic modernist playwrights like Brecht, Beckett, and Sartre.

Central to this new exhibition is the installation 1984 and Beyond, 2005-6, which
comprises three single channel videos and a series of 20 black and white
photographs. The work takes its title from a discussion published in the July and
August 1963 issues of Playboy magazine in which well-known science fiction
writers, including Isaac Asimov and Malcolm Bradbury, discuss a wide range of
issues like humanity and sexuality, collectively speculating about the future world
of 1984. Initially developed as a live work for a theatre festival in Holland, the
subsequent film was made with a Dutch cast in locations such as Rietveldt’s
famed Sonsbeek sculpture pavilion in the Kroller Muller museum, which shelters
a magnificent collection of period Barbara Hepworth bronzes.

The works translation from text to performance creates an uncanny
embodiment of the original discussion, which ranges at times from the comic to
the melancholic, all the while highlighting the distance from the original text of
the gallery viewer. What this ‘distance’ enables is the opportunity for the viewer
to question what s/he is seeing rather than being emotionally lead by convincing
theatrical constructs and dynamics. Shifting between Brechtian strategies of
alienation and daytime TV enthralment, Byrne uses a complex of discursive turns
to establish an installation that allows viewers time and space to cerebrally
engage the work.

The series of black and white photographs, which also form part of the work
initially appear to be period photographs taken in the USA at the time of the
original discussion. However closer inspection establishes doubt about the exact
time-frame of the images, which work within the installation as a form of
contemporary ‘evidence’ of the original sci-fi writers speculations. However,
rather than simply emphasise the pathos in the inaccuracies of the writers
speculative fantasies, the photographs instead dwell on precisely how little has
changed in the world since 1963. In ‘1984 and beyond” Byrne has created a
complex work that meditates on the complexities of futures past, popular
fantasy, and historical continuity.

The front rooms of the gallery, upstairs and downstairs, house a distillation of
distinct but inter-connected recent projects, which directly address the

relationship between archetypal theatre and its historical circumstances. The on-
going photographic series ‘A country road, a tree, evening” figuratively locates the
setting for the play Waiting for Godot in various rural areas that would have been
familiar to Beckett when he wrote the play. In attempting to place the
metaphoric space of the play in precisely indicated places, Byrne’s photographs
eschew a photo-documentary aesthetic in favour of shrill theatricality. Welding
the indexicality of the photographic to the archetypal of theatre, ‘A country road,
a tree, evening’ elegantly manifests the complexities of historical conjecture
within paradoxical photographic images. Downstairs Byrne has installed a
number of elements, including photographs from various on-going series, and a
prop-like object made from photographs of a tree made by Alberto Giacometti
for a 1961 Paris production of Waiting for Godot, the original of which no
longer exists. Subtle correspondences and connections may be read across the
elements, each of which is meticulously annotated with accompanying captions.
Wavering between the specific and the archetypal, Byrne raises questions about
the importance of myth in understanding the world, as well as the origins of
myth in the world.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Byrne studied in New York. He was awarded the
prestigious PS1 studio award in 1997-8 and graduated from the Whitney
Independent Study Programme in 1999. Byrne is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn
award in 2006. He lives and works in Dublin.